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Nitroglycerine is best known for being the explosive substance you daren’t drop if you’re in a 1950s B movie. But, it also has several medical applications including acting as a vasodilator in the treatment of angina. It was in searching for novel and patentable drugs with similar activity that led to the discovery of Viagra, an experimental drug originally destined for the heart, which found itself pumping blood in an altogether different physiological venue.

Now, nitrogylcerine, or glycerine trinitrate as The Times (London) referred to it yesterday, is set to enter clinical trials as a topical alternative to Viagra and other impotence treatments.

Topical, you say? Doesn’t that mean it has to be rubbed in?

Indeed, Futura Medical in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline, hope to market a gel that would be applied directly to the penis, cause vasodilation, and that blood pumping we mentioned earlier. The trials will also investigate the effects the gel has on women who share the experience of topical application with a male partner. Why the ladies don’t get their own separate trial The Times does not say. Of course, nitroglycerine is well known for causing headaches, so there’s a little, or big, wedge of irony in any such trial, surely?

Futura and GSK expect the new product codenamed MED2002, for some odd reason, to pass muster with the regulators in 2008 (so why didn’t they call it MED2008?) and be marketed soon thereafter as an over-the-counter, or maybe under-the-counter-in-a-brown-paper-bag, product.

In the meantime, we now have another product for the spammers to add to their list of fake Rx sales, so watch out for spams with subject lines containing – MED2oo2, M@d2002, Medd2002, etc etc, ad infinitum.